Capitalism in the U.S. has developed to its highest stage, monopoly capitalism or imperialism. The capitalist class, particularly the large monopoly capitalists, live in great splendor by exploiting the working class through the daily robbery of the enormous wealth the workers produce. In contrast to this, intense exploitation, oppression, poverty and misery characterize the lives of the working class.
U.S. imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental features of pre-monopoly capitalism. The U.S., which had a vast, unexploited land mass to plunder and which underwent the rapid development of machine technology, experienced growth unrivaled by any other country during the nineteenth century. It arose and throve with the enslavement of and trade in Blacks from Africa. The widespread extermination of the Indians, the settling of the West, the robbery of Mexico’s northern lands, and the victory of the northern industrial capitalists in the Civil War, all paved the way for the extraordinary growth of large scale industry and finance. The U.S. was firmly established as a bastion of capitalist exploitation and as a prisonhouse of oppressed nationalities.
As capitalism developed throughout the world, millions of peasants and small farmers were driven from their land in various countries. Many of these toilers migrated to the U.S. and, owning no means of production, were forced to sell their labor power as workers to the U.S. capitalist class. The buying and selling of human labor power as a commodity and the production of commodities for profit are among the fundamental features of capitalism.
As more and more workers were drawn into social production, the capitalists increasingly concentrated the ownership of the means of production into their own hands. This contradiction between private appropriation and social production is the fundamental contradiction in all stages of capitalist development.
This contradiction gives rise to the division of society into two great classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Today, the contradiction between these two classes is the principal contradiction in U.S. society.
The bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, is a small class composed of those who own and control the financial institutions and means of production–the land, raw materials, machines, mines, mills, factories, farms. Today, under imperialism, the leading and most powerful capitalists are the monopoly capitalists.
The proletariat, or working class, is made up of those who are deprived of the ownership of the means of production and therefore are forced to sell their labor power as a commodity to the capitalist class. The working class participates directly in production, transportation, communication, service, agriculture, and commerce. It is the class which creates the wealth of society and from which the capitalists extract surplus value. The ranks of the working class also encompass the reserve army of unemployed, including old and disabled workers and semi-permanently and permanently unemployed workers forced to live on public assistance. The leading sector of the working class is the industrial proletariat which is the most highly organized, concentrated and experienced in struggle.
The contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is an antagonistic one that can be resolved only through the armed revolutionary overthrow of the U.S. imperialist ruling class. Because of its organized and concentrated character at the centers of production, the proletariat is the only class able to mobilize, wage and lead the class struggle against the bourgeoisie. It is the only thoroughly revolutionary class, ideologically, politically, and organizationally. Only through the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie can all the other contradictions of imperialism be resolved.
The United States has been a big imperialist power for many decades. The dawn of U.S. imperialism on the world scene occurred with the seizure of the Philippines, Hawaii, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the migration of millions of peasants and workers from Europe, Asia and Latin America. By the end of World War I, the U.S. had become the most powerful capitalist country and, along with other leading imperialists, one of the world’s biggest international exploiters and oppressors. By the end of World War II, the U.S. had become an imperialist superpower and today, along with the Soviet Union, the U.S. is one of the world’s two imperialist superpowers.
Imperialism is the last stage of capitalist development and is the eve of proletarian revolution. In the U.S. today, giant monopolies dominate the economic life of society in place of free competition. The enormous monopolization of production is reflected in the fact that the 100 largest U.S. industrial companies earn well over 50% of all U.S. industrial profits. The growth of these giant monopolies has meant the ruin of these millions of small producers who are driven into the ranks of the working class.
Under imperialism, there is a trend towards state monopoly where important sectors of the economy have become the property of the bourgeois state. In the U.S., some steps have been taken in this direction, such as the nationalization of some railroads. But this use of the state as a “collective capitalist” can in no way save capitalism or cover over the class struggle. On the contrary, it only intensifies the exploitation of the working class and concentrates society’s wealth in ever fewer hands.
Under imperialism, the biggest banks are merged with the giant industries, creating finance capital and a financial oligarchy which rules over U.S. society with an iron fist.
The U.S. imperialists have expanded throughout the world because they are unable to satisfy their drive for profits with the exploitation of their “own” workers alone and require ever-expanding markets in which to dump their industrial goods. They export capital to the sources of raw materials, cheap labor and markets. Economic, political, cultural and military aggression have characterized U.S. imperialism around the world.
The imperialists’ need to export capital and expand their markets has led to the increased plunder of the developing nations by the advanced capitalist countries. The less-developed nations have been turned into colonies and neo-colonies from which the imperialists have extracted tremendous superprofits.
Under imperialism, the territorial division of the world among the imperialist powers has occurred and the economic division of the world is continuing. The constant struggle for territorial and economic division and redivision threatens the world’s people with inter-imperialist war.
Imperialism is a system of continual crisis, reflecting its moribund, decaying and parasitic character. While pre-monopoly capitalism and even imperialism have made great advances in technology, the whole system of imperialism holds back the productive forces.
Today, the world capitalist system is locked in a general, all-round crisis. The general crisis of world capitalism is not only an economic crisis, but also a political, ideological, cultural and military one. This crisis speeds the superpower’s drive even more rapidly towards war and brings about a rising menace of fascism in the U.S.
This general crisis began with World War I which shook capitalism to its foundation and intensified all of the contradictions of the imperialist world. World War I, marked by enormous destruction and untold suffering of the masses, resulted in a massive revolutionary upsurge throughout the world. This included the struggle for socialism as well as national wars of liberation and colonial uprisings against imperialism. The victory of the first socialist revolution in Russia broke the imperialist chain and tore one-sixth of the globe from the power of capital.
Since then, the imperialist chain has been broken by many other victories of the working class revolution. No longer does capitalism represent the sole and all-embracing system of world economy. Today, side by side with the capitalist system, exist China, Albania and other socialist countries which are flourishing, in contrast to the system of imperialism. The socialist countries are demonstrating to the world’s peoples the rottenness of the capitalist system. They provide aid and assistance to the liberation struggles, and are a powerful ally of the revolutionary peoples of the world.
The U.S., once the undisputed ruler of world capitalism, is today a declining superpower in heightened stagnation and decay. Defeated in Indochina, exposed throughout the world, challenged for world hegemony by Soviet social-imperialism, and wracked by the explosive struggles of the U.S. people, the U.S. is locked in the deepest crisis in its history. This crisis is part of the general crisis of world capitalism.
This crisis is sharpening all of the contradictions in U.S. society. The inevitable series of cyclical crises of overproduction are becoming more frequent and devastating in the midst of the general crisis. The fundamental contradiction between private appropriation and social production gives rise to the anarchy of production, its planlessness. Each capitalist or grouping of capitalists produces without knowing how much demand or need there is for their product. Driven by their need for maximum profits and by their competition with each other, the capitalists are forced to throw the greatest possible amount of commodities on the market. At the same time, the enormous growth and development of the productive forces leads to the intensified exploitation of the working class and results in an ever growing army of unemployed. Thus, capitalism reduces the ability of the people to consume these goods by continually driving down their living standards and increasing their impoverishment. The workers are unable to purchase the very goods they themselves have produced.
The crisis is revealing even more clearly to millions of people the totally reactionary character of U.S. imperialism as a system of exploitation, oppression, war, and crisis. The defeats of U.S. imperialism have in no way changed its reactionary and imperialist character. Rather, its defeats have made it more desperate and just as brutal. Like all reactionaries, U.S. imperialism appears outwardly strong but is inwardly weak.
The U.S. state is an instrument of violent class domination over the working people. Every state is an organ of class rule, an instrument for the suppression of one class by another. There can be no “state of the whole people” as the modern revisionists have asserted. The U.S. state is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie composed of the government bureaucracy, courts and the armed might of police, army and prisons.
The bourgeoisie also strengthens its hold through its ideological influence on large numbers of people in this country. The bourgeoisie covers up its reactionary class rule under the veil of bourgeois democracy and the “two party” electoral system. It uses a democratic facade to conceal its brutal exploitation of the working class and its oppression of the minority nationalities.
Democracy, in fact, exists only for the bourgeoisie. The only course for the working class is to violently smash the bourgeoisie’s state apparatus, including the bourgeois military apparatus and police, and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat. The bourgeois democratic revolution ended more than 100 years ago. There can be no “democratic” or two-stage revolution in this country, but rather the socialist revolution of the working class in one stage.
The working class is the most progressive and most revolutionary class ever known in history and stands in the center of our epoch of the world proletarian revolution. It has the power in its hands to forge a new socialist society out of the ruins of the old capitalist one, and it alone is capable of running society in the interests of the great majority.
Despite new theories of the working class “dying away,” being “bought off,” or losing its revolutionary potential, the scientific study of capitalist society shows without a doubt that the proletariat is suffering more than ever before from capitalist exploitation and oppression and exerting the leading role in the revolutionary struggle. Growing in size and strength, the working class is the only really revolutionary class, while all others tend toward vacillation and disintegration. The international working class has “nothing to lose but its chains and a world to win.” Through its own emancipation, it will smash the chains of imperialism which bind the oppressed people of the whole world. The victory of the proletariat is inevitable.